DEFINITIONS OF HAPPINESS IN OTTOMAN SYRIA: Hegemonic and subordinate voices during the nineteenth century

As part of the positive turn in the history of emotions, this chapter examines two perspectives on the meanings of happiness in the nineteenth-century Ottoman society during the Tanzimat (re-organization) and the Nahda (the Arab awakening). It first explores the views of hegemonic voices including Ottoman state and bureaucrats, Arab intellectuals, parents, and American missionaries whose definitions of happiness appear in their lectures, edicts, newspaper columns, memoirs, and manuals. This provides the background for a case study of the subordinate voice of Ottoman/Arab Christian adolescents in agrarian parts of Ottoman Syria in a rare corpus of 200 essays written by Syrian Christian adolescents enrolled in the Syrian Protestant College in 1885. The chapter discusses the ways in which these adolescents’ views of happiness differed from the hegemonic view.